Cloud transformation in the telecommunications industry has reached a critical stage as it reshapes economic structures and market landscapes, a senior figure at Huawei has stated at a major online conference.
Peng Song, President, Carrier BG Marketing & Solution Sales Dept. at Huawei, highlighted the way that, currently, most communication service providers have hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
At a session on Carrier Cloud Transformation at the Digital Transformation Summit, Mr Peng said that according to the data reporting, worldwide an estimated 15% of carriers would, however, develop and implement a comprehensive cloud strategy by the end of next year. This can be translated to a cloud market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as fierce competition from the leading cloud service providers and OTTs [over-the-top services].
“For carriers, only by building an efficient and agile ICT infrastructure can they stay competitive, seize new markets and achieve new growth”.
The use of data technology, information technology and communication technology is enabling carriers to build what has been described as a second growth curve in China’s telecoms market, with more than 10% annual increases in revenue, which is much higher than in many other markets.
Mr Peng said the cloud transformation enacted by carriers should take a “CT plus Cloud” approach which means operators’ cloud transformation should be based on communication technology (CT).
“We should leverage cloud transformation to magnify the values of telecom networks and services to unleash the connectivity dividends”, he said, describing three key ways to make use of opportunities.
Firstly, carriers can, he said, expand network boundaries with the cloud, improve network value in the B2B market and enlarge the scope of connectivity dividends.
He highlighted how, in China, Huawei provides network plus distributed cloud capabilities, so carriers improve the productivity of the office and the production activities of their enterprise customers.
Customers enjoy a one quarter increase in their addressable market space and can expand their influence in vertical industries.
Mr Peng’s second key area of opportunity concerns the way in which carriers can build a cloud platform to promote digital business innovation in a way that helps customers achieve connectivity dividends by launching new services.
“Carriers can create collaborative cloud platforms that bridge telecom services and digital services to accelerate innovation, and to acquire more customers from various market segments”, he said.
As an example, Mr Peng highlighted the way that in Europe carriers have been able to migrate their development and test environment, and hundreds of services, to Huawei Cloud platform.
One carrier shortened its time to market for a digital service by 75% thanks to an agile development platform and telecom PaaS (Platform as a service) capabilities. This shows, Mr Song indicated, how Huawei’s solutions enable carriers to respond to customers’ needs.
A third issue centres on how the pre-integrated Huawei Cloud solution can, by expanding connectivity dividends, help the sustainable growth of a company’s primary business.
“As far as the telecom cloud transformation is concerned, it requires the cloud platform to proactively adapt to the telecom service architecture”, Mr Peng said.
The distributed cloud architecture must meet the requirements in data security and management, while a rational time line of cloud transformation is required so that services are migrated to the cloud without disruption.
In another example illustrating how solutions have been used, Mr Peng described how, in Asia, Huawei deployed CEM applications on its distributed cloud.
Less sensitive businesses are deployed on the public cloud, which is more agile and elastic, while more sensitive businesses are deployed on Huawei Cloud Stack locally. This ensures business efficiency and means that customers have full control of their data and business activities.
So that cloud transformation can provide quality services, it is essential to cooperate with strategic partners who understand the telecoms industry.
Huawei has, Mr Peng indicated, done just this, having worked extensively with more than 120 carriers on cloud services by the end of last year.
“We will continue to make strategic investments in ICT and leverage our localised service capabilities worldwide to enable cloud transformation for our carrier customers”, Mr Peng said. “Huawei is determined to keep working with carriers to accelerate the cloud transformation journey, build new capabilities, and embrace new growth”.
